This seems to be the biggest challenge to overcome, really. Looking at my daily computer usage, much of what I do is browser-based (email, calendar, CRM, connecting with customers -- heck, even the product my company creates is accessed through a web-based console).
Web pages these days are so much more than just "web pages" -- they're entire programs, effectively, which means they have hefty requirements.
The rest of what I do is console-based, and I can use just about anything with a keyboard, screen, and network connection -- up (down?) to and including my VIC-20.
That's a bit odd. I used a raspi (1GiB aarch64 sbc with WiFi and SD card) as a desktop in college and while it was unpleasant to have Firefox and LibreOffice open at the same time I don't think I ran into anything that flat out didn't load.
The rpi has hardware video acceleration even just a little bit, and the Celeron 1.4ghz laptop I had did not have any hardware acceleration of any kind. That was the difference really between my Phenom II X4 and the Ryzen 5 1400. Aside from obvious architecture differences, if my Phenom II had the video codecs built in, it'd have been plenty fast.
There's more to CPU's than clock speed and basic architecture. Features matter.
I used to have a laptop that was a Celeron 1.4ghz with 1.5gb memory. Even with the lightest weight Linux I could load on it, it wouldn't load most web pages.